Lately been thinking about possibilities of afterlife. Damn I hope religion got it all wrong. I can’t stand an eternal life promised to good christians or heaven with virgins guaranteed to true muslims.

Spookiest of all is reincarnation by bad karma. It says that if you commit suicide, you return in next life to a similar condition as past life. If you do it a second time, you return a third time and so on. Over and over again until you finally get your act right.

I need someone to prove its all bullshit, that when I die, I cease to be. Mind dissolves as brain disintegrates as body decomposes. No soul or nothing left of me, absolute zero.

I have faith, infact I’m quite religious at times. But that doesn’t matter cause the existence of God is useless.
I’m worried about afterlife because neither science nor faith has any answer. Living is unbearable but I don’t want to die in ignorance. I’m restless.

“Although there are practitioners who do not believe in any form of afterlife, it is nevertheless a common belief among Wiccans that human beings have a spirit or soul that survives bodily death” my religion has its own perceptions from person to person. it may exist. it may not. these are my beliefs. i think. im kinda teetering on the fence about this. I’m not really sure on my my beliefs about the after life. There are spirits because we can talk to them and I myself when I was younger experienced their presences but where would they all go. I mean we are talking about a lot of dead people and there’s only so much space in the universe. Wait I think I figured something out. After you pass away your soul leaves your body to manifest itself as a spirit. Your previous life depicts your new life as I mentioned under life. I believe that if you did good then you choose what life you want to lead. You can be a dolphin surfing the waves. A hummingbird flying through the skies. Or you can continue life as a human. But if you made bad choices you have to live life as an animal to learn to not be bad. That everything has its place in life. And when a spirit is summoned it temporarily leaves the body it’s inhabiting. Of course that would leave the question as to why there is so much bad in the world. I guess after so many lifetimes they revert back to their old ways.

I’m unaware of Wiccan belief, is it part of Christian system?
What you write sounds very much like reincarnation based on karma and that’s what is disturbing. I’ve not been evil but all in all my life this far has been a failure. I’ve not been mean and hurtful on purpose but I’ve let my beloved ones down. I’m not criminal but have added no value to society. Now if Wiccans are right, will that make me an animal in next life, preyed upon by wild carnivores?
I’m okay with that but I don’t want to return as self-conscious human with burden of being. I can’t take it anymore. One life is enough. Too much in fact and too long.

no it is not a part of the christian system. each wiccan has their own beliefs so really its up to you. but i believe that you could be a lion or an eagle something strong and mighty for everything youve been through.

You can get a long way through reason and evidence. For example, our experience of existence, our ‘self’, our ‘essence’, seems to be completely dependent on the physical brain. Those with brain injuries or dementia seem capable of becoming completely different people, based on the destruction of the brain. Dementia has been said to be like the slow death of the mind, as parts of the brain cease to function. Chemical changes to the brain also seem to radically change the experience of consciousness – for example through hallucinogenic drugs, where a feeling of ‘oneness’ with reality is encountered. It would seem to follow that ‘you’ are a product of your physical brain, and as that ceases to function, so does your existence.

There is also the question of how your ‘self’, if it could somehow exist after the death of the brain, would be transmitted to another life. Presumably then it would not be a physical thing. So how would it interact with anything? How would it move from one place to another? Would the afterlife be physical?

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever have enough confidence in my own reason to be sure that there’s no afterlife. After all, if my mind is just this product of an evolved organ full of chemical changes, how could I expect it to have a secure view on the ultimate nature of reality? I guess it’ll just be a case of me being so desperate to escape this life that I’m willing to risk ending up somewhere worse.

If its proved that our self or essence is without doubt dependent on the physical brain, I’ll be free of all metaphysical rabble constantly churning my head.
I have great hopes with modern microbiology, if those guys convince the world with experiment that there is no consciousness/soul surviving medically defunct brain it will free us from age old shackles of religion. In an interview, Richard Dawkins after he survived a stroke, asked about his mortality, said something like.. nothing lies beyond, my neurons disconnect, my brain ceases function, I stop existing.
I wish I could be so confident but I’m not, maybe because I’m not total atheist, but that’s not the point. Dawkins even if wrong in his disbelief, seems to have a jest for life and might end up in heaven if there be one, whereas I can’t live with myself in this life or next life or heaven.
I’m desperate because I don’t know if there is any escape. What if its the very act of suicide that makes you end up someplace worse, will you still do it knowing it beforehand?

I don’t think we can ever know conclusively. Doubt is part of the human condition. There is no way to scientifically prove that consciousness doesn’t survive the death of the brain, just as there’s no way to prove that it does – consciousness is a subjective experience, and isn’t open to objective measurement. All we can do is make inferences from what seems to happen to people’s experiences of consciousness when the brain is physically altered.

Perhaps if there were a heaven your experience there would change you so that you could live with yourself? Isn’t that kind of the point of God – that he makes you whole? Or maybe the escape is through change in this life?

I find it hard to believe that anything lasts forever – my suspicion is that any torment, however long, must come to an end – that there will always be some escape. But we can’t know for sure. We’re not in the position to understand it all.

If I could somehow know that suicide would send me somewhere worse, then obviously I wouldn’t do it. But we can’t know. So it’s a question of whether you’re desperate enough to risk it,

Thank you for the reference. First time I listened to Sean Carrol, admire his logical reasoning but its not any more convincing than what Dawkins, Tyson or Hitchens have to say.
Carroll’s argument makes an assumption that consciousness must have a carrier to move out of body at the time of death and so, needs mass. He claims to have conducted experiments that show no mass is lost after death.
My concern is – firstly, how can we be sure that physical laws govern metaphysics? What if something is hidden from the view of science? Simply put, what if soul indeed has no mass?
Secondly, we’re bound by scale. We and our instruments of measurement work in the middle of infinitesimally small particles and unimaginably large/infinite universe. How do we know whether or not soul occupies an immeasurably small weight?
Thirdly, there was an experiment conducted in 1900s by a physicist McDougall. He measured the mass of some bodies just before and after death and found a difference of about 21 gms. He thus claimed that soul weighed 21 gms. This conclusion was deemed unscientific because of sample size. Can same logic not be used to be skeptic about Carroll’s experiment?
But thanks for introducing Carroll. I’ll check out his other talks.

Yoges. I’m wondering. In the case of identical twins, their personalities are different from one another even though they share the exact same genetic sequencing. Same with clones, I’d imagine: identical in every way but in personality (which would make more sense in the case of clones, than it would in that of identical twins being raised in the same household).
Idk.
I’m hoping that done is done. But I worry, too, because I’ve seen some strange phenomenon over the years.
I disagree in the philosophy shared here by other(s) that what believe is what is. My thinking that rain is sand doesn’t change the nature of rain. And the notion of being punished to a “lower” life form for being less than? What does it mean to be a really good “bear” or “wolf” or “mouse” or “eagle”? Better to be a single-celled creature with a super short lifespan. But if I am a very good and wise amoeba, will I reincarnate into an earthworm and then into a bee and then into a butterfly and then into. . . . Is a bee good or bad for stinging? Can it know? Is it from the bee’s perspective or from the person who is allergic to the sting?
I’m not smart enough for this world. Better to be an amoeba, ah, that short, simple life free of pondering our enduring questions.

Maybe karma doesn’t apply if you’re bee or amoeba, or a different code of law is used to judge the actions of animals. But even as amoeba you’ll die, so what next.

I came across a pdf titled The Present some time back. It messed me up with conflicting ideas about the value of my existence. The writer put a theory about millions of cyclic births, just one of them being human, so sick as I am of life I’ll have to come back to this state after living centuries in animal kingdom. It’s like evolution theory in spiritual realm, only recurring. I prefer not to believe that. But who knows. My head is filled with fantasies these days.

Since when did religion get anything right? Talking snakes/donkeys, dirt-man, rib-wife, virgin births, walking on water, Mohammad flies to heaven on a winged horse? When was the last time you saw any of this in reality and not in a book of fiction/mythology?

Religion told us that the Earth was flat and we’re at the center, they were wrong. They thought mental illness was demon possession and to treat sickness you needed leeches and blood-letting.

So if religion got everything else wrong why would you trust any of it? Ghosts, goblins, fairies, Gods, angels, devils, all of these things are a product of the human imagination, they do not exist in reality or we’d already have evidence of these things.

And don’t fall for the “you can’t prove that they don’t exist” BS argument….if anyone claims that Vulcans (like Spock from Star Trek) are real, we need hard proof and nothing less. It is up to the person making the claim to present evidence, not for the doubter to refute. If I said “I can fly” you said “prove it” the appropriate response is to show that I can, not to retort “prove that I can’t.”

So the bottom line here, throw religion in the trash, they’re all a bunch of ancient Bronze Ages myths and they do nothing but poison people’s lives and substitute truth for fiction.

We are all based on atoms when you die so do your neurons and you (as an entity) disappear forever. There is no afterlife, no rebirth, none of the bullshit dreamt up by sheepherders from a pre-scientific era.

Just study some science, read Atheist thinkers/philosophers and you’ll have your head cleared of all the nonsense your parents brainwashed you with, assuming you were raised in a religious home.

I agree, religion is plain bullshit. I did have a mildly religious upbringing but I don’t take nonsense anymore, just grown out of it. Regardless, I’m not atheist, rather an agnostic. In fact I just don’t care if there’s a thing like God. If there is, it sucks. If not, all the better.
But I can’t be as dismissive about the possibility of soul/consciousness. It’s obvious there’s nothing like evil spirits – when was the last time we read ‘Man eaten alive by a headless Apparition’ in the papers. I understand that my body is a bunch of atoms and my mind is a web of neurons but is that all I am? What if I am not than my memories and my personality?
What if I’m a weightless, featureless soul that fucked up its chance at life in this material world loaded with dark memories and a warped personality? What can all of our science possibly do about that? It’s beyond all the math of the world. Only personal experience of death can reveal the truth.

Your post gives me faith in humanity that people can think their way out of religion, it’s very good to see. Well I tend to approach most topics like this from a Scientific (Rational-Empiricist) perspective. So I’d ask if souls exist what are they made out of? How do they attach or detach from neurons? When has any scientist observed any soul leaving the body?

When I was younger I even considered the idea of Telekinesis, but then I realized that mind/thoughts cannot influence physical reality. The mind is amazing but it limited only to thoughts, ideas, emotions but nothing beyond that.

Do keep in mind that souls, disembodied consciousness, and the afterlife are also products of religion, they are not scientific or proven ideas-just more remnants of the fertile human imagination.

Yes I realize some ideas are very seductive and coincide with our intuitions, so they’re hard to reject. The idea that when we die so does our mind is rather dull, we want to imagine or believe we live beyond death, nothing wrong with thinking about that.

But for me, it is a scientific question. If there was another realm, extra-dimensions, an afterlife then Science would’ve already told us about it, which means they don’t exist. And I’d rather accept the boring truth than an exciting lie.

Well I didn’t become an Atheist overnight, it took me time to get my ideas sorted out, even after I decided I was an Atheist, and we all go at our pace. Fwiw, I’d say you’re on the right track, keep thinking, questioning and you’ll free yourself of any ideological traps.